


Determination

by fallingdownthewishingwell



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Also her dog appears, Angst, Female pronouns for Pidge, For like a second but I love dogs so, Gen, Mom Holt - Freeform, My First Fanfic, Pidge just wants her family back, So how does her mom fit into that?, Spoilers, definitely worth it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-07
Updated: 2016-07-07
Packaged: 2018-07-22 01:02:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7412281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingdownthewishingwell/pseuds/fallingdownthewishingwell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>-Spoilers up to episode 5-</p><p>Once Katie makes up her mind, nothing can stop her. Not even her own mother.<br/>In which Katie will do anything to find out the truth-like becoming Pidge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Determination

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there! This is my first fic(I really can't believe I held out this long, honestly), so I hope you enjoy! After binge watching Voltron I couldn't stop wondering how Pidge's mom fit into her flashbacks, so here are my thoughts on that. I'd love to know what you think!  
> Also, I'm referring to Pidge as Katie until she gets to the Garrison, and I'm using female pronouns for her since she tells the team that she's a girl. I think that's all, so happy reading!

Katie couldn’t breathe. This couldn’t be real. But her mom was crying beside her while the one eyed man at their door told them he was sorry for their loss. It had only taken Commander Iverson a few short minutes to tear her world in half.

“Pilot error? That’s impossible, their pilot was the best the academy had to offer. The best you had to offer” Katie cried. 

Without realizing it, she was shaking the Commander-or trying to since he towered over her- but she was beyond caring. She kept shouting at him, denying over and over, knowing that her dad and brother couldn’t be dead. Oh god, not Matt, her stupid brother, how could he do this to her?

But the Commander only gave her a fixed stare and repeated, “I’m sorry, but there was nothing we could do. We have lost all contact and we can only assume that human error is what made the equipment overload as it did. I really am sorry for your loss. The Holts were great cadets.” 

And with that, he detangled Katie’s hands from his uniform, nodded to her mom, and was off. The door closed softly behind him. It seemed wrong to her that everything in looked so normal in their house, so ready for Matt and her dad to just waltz right back into it with just as much ease as it took that stupid man and his stupid goatee to tell Katie that her family had just been cut in half. 

Katie and her mom stood there in the doorway for several minutes until her mom had gathered herself enough to lead them into the living room. Scruffy, their small grey dog, paced at their feet as the pair cried together, and seeing his confusion just made Katie cry even harder. Her mom’s hand soothed her hair, and, just for the moment, neither one of them tried to be strong for the sake of the other. For now, all they could do was hold the only other family they were sure hadn’t left them.

Later that night, Katie stood in the shadows as her mom watched as the news reported the failed mission to the moon of Kerberos. Something inside her set and her eyes narrowed in determination. It couldn’t have ended like this. And she was going to figure out the truth, no matter the cost.

***

“Katie, please, don’t you think this is a bit… excessive?” Her mom was at the door to her room, but that didn’t stop her from typing furiously at her computer.

“It’s not, Mom, I just have to check out how the Kerberos shuttles used the hydopowered fuel to calibrate to the landing site. I’ll be down to eat in a minute.”

Her mom sighed. “Hun, that’s not what I mean.” She was quiet for a few minutes, and Katie had just forgotten she was standing in her door when her mom moved into her room and sat on her bed. After taking a deep breath, she finally said, “It’s been months now, and you haven’t let up on this investigation of yours. I’m sure you’re sleeping half as much as you used to.”

She looked up at Katie, and saw how her fingers were frozen on the keyboard. Katie still wasn’t looking at her, and a wave of emotion made her mom’s breath hitch. Tears threatened, but she refused to let them fall. Instead she put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and said, “Katie, I understand why you’re so determined to find out all you can about it, but all that information can drown a person. The Kerberos mission took away so much from us. I’m not sure I could handle it if it took you too.”

Katie finally looked into her mom’s eyes and saw nothing but concern, but that did nothing to calm the storm inside her. She took her glasses off and tensely wiped the lenses on her pajama shirt. Couldn’t she see how wrong it all was? Katie was sure there was some piece missing because the mission was perfect. The cadets were perfect, or as close to it as a person could be. Anything that might have gone wrong, they could have fixed, together. 

“Mom, I’m sorry but there is just something here that I can’t leave alone. Whatever it takes, I’ve got to figure this out, if not for Matt and Dad, then for myself. I can handle it Mom, just trust me.” She tried to give her mom a reassuring look, but she didn’t look reassured at all. So Katie tried a different approach and said, “Remember when I was eight and that pigeon was stuck downstairs? And it had been flapping around down there for like three days and no one could catch it?” 

“I remember, you coaxed it out, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“Well, Dad always told me that it had to have been me to get it out. He told me I had the curiosity and the perseverance to work through the problem.” And by curiosity she meant stubbornness and by perseverance she meant sleeping in the basement until the pigeon finally let down its guard down long enough for her to stuff it in a box. 

Her mom finally cracked a grin. “Matt called you the Pigeon Whisperer for the rest of the summer.”

Katie smiled at the memory, too. It had been a good summer. “I owe it to them to find out the truth. I’m sure this isn’t it, and I just can’t stop until I know what really happened.”

Her mom looked at her and knew nothing she could say would stop Katie. She said, “Please, just be careful. Don’t throw away your future chasing something you can’t change. Your Dad wouldn’t want that, and neither would Matt.”

Katie hugged her mom and told her, “I know. And don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”

***

“Katie what on Earth have you done?”

Katie was standing at the foot of the steps with her newly short hair and completely girl-concealing clothes. Her mom was staring at her in shock while Scruffy lazily padded around Katie’s feet. Katie tried her best to look innocent, but it was obvious this was not some teenage rebellious act. This ran much deeper.

“Mom don’t freak out. I’m just… changing up my look?”

She did not look convinced. “I know Commander Iverson found you sneaking around his office again. That can’t possibly have anything to do with this, now does it?”

Katie cursed that man under her breath. That guy just had to ruin everything. She’d just needed to see the crash the probes on Kerberos had supposedly seen, but the lack of crash site only confirmed what she had been researching for so long. That something very bad had happened to the Kerberos mission, and she was going to find out what it was.

“I need to do this to get the answers I need, Mom. You can’t change my mind.”

Her mom pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed in frustration. “I know, Katie, just… be careful, please. If you're going to do this, let me help you. Don't shut me out again.” 

Katie’s mom looked at her, and for the first time Katie saw just how tired she was. If she were any less determined she might have felt guilty for putting her mom through this, but she was beyond that point now. Instead, Katie just gave her mom a hug, promised to call soon, and was on her way to her first day as a cadet of Galaxy Garrison. Her first day as Pidge Gunderson.

***

Pidge was tense as she walked into Galaxy Garrison, her ‘home’ for the foreseeable future. She kept her head down as she passed security guard after security guard, relieved that they didn’t recognize her. She tried not to think about it, but if they find out she wasn’t who she said she was, she might get charged with treason for real this time. But there was no use worrying, Pidge told herself. She only needed to keep her head down until she found some solid answers about what happened to Matt and her dad. 

And, in a way, she had learned a lot in the past year. Not only had she built her own computer that could scan Kerberos and beyond, she had even picked up what she believed to be alien chatter. Pidge could hardly contain herself at the discovery-what had been her father’s life work-but she’d still kept it to herself. After all, it would give her away, and she couldn’t have that happen. And Pidge was grateful for that now, since the alien chatter had been picking up lately, and she was sure it meant everything was going to change soon. 

Throughout the whole initiation ceremony she’d been thinking about that repeating word ‘Voltron’ that kept popping up in her scans. The general training and placement tests went by in a blur, and suddenly she found herself assigned to a flying trio. At the assignments board she met the other two.

“Uh, could I do that from the ground?” The bigger one was saying as she got closer.

The other boy gave him an unimpressed look and turned back to the board. He said, “And our communications officer is… Who the heck is Pidge Gunderson?”

“Right here,” Pidge said, finally speaking up. The boys approached and introduced themselves. Lance, the taller and more obnoxious one was their fighter pilot, and Hunk, the larger but much nicer boy, was their engineer. The annoying one tried to get her to go do some ‘team bonding,’ but Pidge figured that, for Lance, that probably meant dragging her and Hunk around while trying (and failing) to flirt with as many girls he could find. Pidge declined. She had more important things to do, like decoding radio messages from aliens and finding out what Voltron might have to do with her family’s disappearance. 

She looked back before turning the corner, wondering for a second if she was making the right choice, but she just sighed and continued on to hack stupid Iverson’s stupid computer. Without getting caught, this time. 

***

Their first rescue simulation was a disaster. Pidge felt awful as they stood in front of Commander Iverson and all the other fighter class cadets as they told them everything they had done wrong. It was even worse when Iverson said their mistakes were the kind that made the Kerberos mission a failure. 

If Lance hadn’t shut her mouth she might have accidentally spilled everything she knew about the mission, and it was way too much classified info for her to pass off as some ‘weird random thoughts she had about a mission she had absolutely no personal interests in, no sir!’

That night Pidge snuck out onto the roof with her equipment, as she had for the past couple nights. She set it all up, and listened to the radio chatter as the repetitions of the word ‘Voltron’ came up more than ever before. She had been listening for weeks, and something weird was definitely going down tonight.

Suddenly, one side of Pidge’s headphones was pulled back and a voice behind her asked “You come up here to rock out?”

Pidge gasped are whirled around to see Lance and Hunk beside her on the rooftop. She recovered a bit and tried to look innocent as they scrutinized her computers. “Oh, Lance, Hunk. No, um, just looking at the stars”

Yeah, that was not convincing at all.

“Where’d you get this stuff? It doesn’t look like Garrison tech.” Lance said

“I built it” Pidge replied, smug.

“You built all this?” Hunk asked, inching out to touch the screens.

“Stop it!” Pidge said and smacked his hand away. “With this thing, I can scan all the way to the edge of the solar system.” It was nice to finally get a little recognition for her tech.

Lance looked impressed for a second, then suspicious. “That right? All the way to Kerberos?” Pidge looked away, and noticed Hunk sneaking toward her computers again. Lance continued, “You go ballistic every time the instructors bring it up. What’s your deal?”

“Second warning, Hunk!” Pidge shot out to the creeping Hunk, and he retreated sadly.

“Look, Pidge, if we’re going to bond as a team, we can’t have any secrets,” Lance finished. And maybe he was right. Or, at least, it might be time to let others in on the whole aliens-are-real and I’ve-been-listening-to-their-radio and they-weird-search-for-this-voltron-thing-could-be-a-bad-thing-for-Earth.

Pidge sighed. “Fine. The world as you know it is about to change.” 

***

It was the beginning to the most eventful night in Pidge’s life. It was quite the surprise to find out that it had been Shiro who’d flown down in that alien spaceship. Pidge had met him before the Kerberos mission, but he looked so different now, with the tuft of white hair and the scar across the bridge of his nose. He looked like he’d been through hell and back. But, surely he knew what had happened to Matt and her dad. 

Next thing she knew they were rescuing Shiro, and she was soon holding an unconscious Shiro while clinging to a flyer pod brought by a guy named Keith who Lance apparently had had a pretty one-sided rivalry with. They took refuge at a small house in the desert, and when Shiro finally woke he couldn’t remember much of his past year, much less what happened to his crewmembers. Pidge was pretty disappointed, but there was so much more going on that she could hardly dwell on it now. 

Soon they were searching the desert for this Voltron weapon, and, eventually, they found that huge blue lion. Within minutes they were flying around in the huge alien lion-ship, then running away from other less friendly aliens, then flying so far she even got to see Kerberos before they agreed to go into the wormhole directly ahead of them. Pidge marveled at the technology that made this all possible, it was like nothing she’d ever seen. Or felt, she added, as entering the wormhole made her suddenly feel groundless.

Only then did Pidge think for a second that maybe she should’ve called her mom from Galaxy Garrison like she’d asked Pidge to. But then a new planet opened up ahead of them and every other thought fell behind her.


End file.
